Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.
Here’s where I’m going to be tonight:
Evan Mandery Book launch party
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street
New York, NY
If you’re into brilliant writers, come by and celebrate. I will probably pretend I don’t know you. Don’t be put off by it.
Whenever friends visit me here in the Northeast United States, they usually treat public transportation as some sort of bizarre tourist attraction. While there are certainly other areas of the country that have well-developed public transit systems, few have achieved the penetration, saturation, and necessity that is the New York City area. While my hick visitors treat buses and subways like some sort of crazy ride devised to entertain them (“Look! Real graffiti! Ooh—do you think that guy has a gun?”) you and I regard them as absolute necessities. Most of us ride the bus and PATH trains every week, if not every day. Some of us, in a shocking situation people from, say, Texas will simply never be able to comprehend, don’t even have cars.
So, while visitors from places where you have to drive an hour just to pick up a pizza can act like riding the D train to Yankee Stadium is some sort of an amusement park ride, for me, public transit is how I get around, period. The trains of this area are my legs. Buses, too, of course. Which is unfortunate, since so many bus drivers are obviously insane.
The subways and the PATH train aren’t so bad, since the people operating them—if indeed there are people, since there are a lot of robot trains operating in Manhattan these days—are usually hidden away from public view, only rarely snuffling out of their little control rooms like the Phantom of the Opera, and sticking to the shadows. You can ride the PATH train for days on end and have almost no human contact at all, unless you count being jowl-to-cheek with complete strangers with questionable-at-best bathing habits—which I do not.
The buses, however, are driven by real live people, and most of them are crazy. You’re completely reliant on them to even get on the bus—who hasn’t stood there in the pouring rain as a devilish bus driver speeds past your stop, bus apparently empty, for no known reason? Or run a block and a half screaming for the bus only to have it pull away when you’re within feet of the front door, the driver gleefully ignoring your screams, your irate pounding, and even the shouts of protest from luckier commuters already on-board? Oh, the bus drivers are evil, that’s for sure. That would be bad enough—that would simply require guerrilla warfare, which I am prepared to wage for the right reasons. Or, to be totally honest, for no reason at all. The salt in the wounds is that if you do manage to gain admittance to a bus, going, say, from tenth and Washington in Hoboken to the PATH station, you have a good chance of being driven there by someone who has given up the struggle for coherency.
There is, for example, one jolly fellow who will offer the entire bus a running commentary about his opinions and impressions of Hoboken and the people who live there, as compared to his beloved Queens. Queens, apparently, is a paradise of bus drivers who know how to drive and citizens who know enough to fear the bus drivers. He complains that people cross the street in front of his bus and that traffic is terrible and that people don’t know how to drive—the monologue tends to repeat a bit at this point. I’m never sure who, exactly, he is talking to. I suppose someone could politely ask him to shut up, or at least to stop insulting us, but personally I’d be afraid to find out what kind of reaction that would elicit. I’m too young to die.
At least that guy speaks. I firmly believe in obeying the Rules of Polite Society, which form the basis for any civilized discourse, and one of those rules is that you don’t treat people performing paid services for you like they’re invisible. So I usually greet the driver when I get on the bus and I generally wish them a good day/night when I get off. Most of them at least grunt in my general direction, but there are a couple of zombie-like drivers who say nothing, and generally don’t even look at you. These cheerful souls are more than just rude: They’re disturbing. I have to wonder what kind of marvelous interior world they see as they drive their route with mechanical, memorized efficiency. It’s easy to imagine that there are no other people in this interior world, and that someday they might decide to take a bold step towards making that paradise reality. Whenever I get one of these unfriendly drivers I pick a seat near the emergency exit, just in case my evening ends with a thrilling escape from a burning bus.
The lessons are clear: You must always be ready to be in the power of an insane person, and prepared to fight them in hand-to-hand combat just to get home from work. Why would anyone live anywhere else?
Well, lookie here! Simon @ Bookgeeks in the U.K. has written up a fantastic review of The Eternal Prison. Since he wasn’t terribly enamored of The Digital Plague, this is pretty satisfying! Once again, if you’ve been hesitating to buy TEP because of doubts about its awesomeness, this ought to to allay your fears.
A big part of Why I Write (aside from the free booze at parties every 5 years or so, of course) is to achieve some sort of immortality. I’m pretty conscious of being a tiny speck in the universe, and a tiny speck in the flow of time since the Big Bang. I’m aware that the vast majority of people don’t achieve any kind of lasting fame, and the even vaster percentage of writers get swept aside. It’s shocking, for example, to learn that The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, two books that dominated much of my high school English courses, are now slowly fading into obscurity. Slowly, yes, but fading. I mean, shit; if Salinger can fade into obscurity, we’re all fucked.
But of course it makes sense: Part of what makes it always seem like books were better in previous eras is the simple fact that history’s manic fingers have scubbed away the dross: All that’s left after 100 or 200 years is the really significant work. The merely great eventually gets swept aside. So, maybe Salinger and Knowles were merely great, and not Great, know what I mean? They hung on for 50 years, but won’t make 100. We can’t all be Shakespeare, after all.
And then there’s me: I suspect I don’t stand a chance.
Of course, if we want to look at it with the Big View it doesn’t matter because the sun will swell up and destroy the Earth eventually, anyway, and even if we flee the burning globe for other planets, entropy will catch us, babies, and swallow everything eventually. So why bother? Since we can’t even invent a comsumer-usable jetpack, I doubt we’re ever going to conquer quantum physics and find a way to step out of time and become truly eternal. So you have to have some perspective. The fact is, culture changes and the world moves on, and you’re lucky if you’re still relevant a decade after you first appear in print (or on film, or on the radio, or whatever).
When I was a kid, there were certain things that linked me with older generations whether I realized it or not: Bugs Bunny cartoons. The Honeymooners. The Brady Bunch – all of these weird pop cultural icons had been around for so long, people 20 years older than me knew them as well and we had a shared vocabulary. A lot of that has faded away. You can’t easily see unedtited Warner Bros cartoons any more, due to the excessive violence, occasional racism, and cheery 1940s slang. Those old sitcoms that stretch back to the 1950s and 1960s may still be on, somewhere, but it’ll be on a ghetto like Nick at Nite or something. My friend Ken and I had an extended joke concerning old Bugs Bunny cartoons the other night and it occurred to me that people 10 years younger than us (or maybe 20 years younger) might not understand a word we were saying – this is culture leaving you behind.
Which is okay. It’s a natural function, and I actually think this has been artificially retarded over the last 50 years due to television, maybe over the last 100 years due to radio and movies. It wasn’t until radio and other modern media, after all, that everyone in the country, or at least a large proportion of them, could simultaneously share a pop culture moment, then go into work the next day and discuss it immediately. And as The Entertainment Industry fractures into a million pay services that cater to your personal taste, we’re leaving that era behind. I grew up in a world with three networks and four local TV stations, a world where every major city had a handful of radio stations serving broad genres. Today you can choose from hundreds of stations and on-demand movies etc, you can buy Satellite Radio, you can massage your cultural experience into something unique and completely unshared by anyone else.
Which means when you go into work the next day, you might not have anything to talk about. Except the last bastion of shared experience, sports, and occasional movies that hit that blockbuster status.
I think we’ve hit that stage where Jeff is a little drunk and rambling, so let’s wrap it up. In closing, I think it would be best if I simply attain the wealth and power necessary to build a monument to myself, sort of like Bender’s “Remember Me” statue from Futurama:
As promised: The second plot summary video in honor of the UK release of The Eternal Prison: “The Digital Plague in One Minute”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrIGmocXI4A
Tell me that isn’t the greatest plot summary ever, I dare you.
How many writers do you know who have a blurb on a Japanese translation published by Haikasoru? That’s right: One. Namely, me (if you look closely at this image, you’ll see my name down there at the bottom). I was psyched to get an advanced peek at Slum Online and thoroughly enjoyed the book – I just wish I’d thought of Nick Mamatas’ neat blurb for it: “Catcher in the Rye with MMO karate fights!” Now I am jealous, as my blurb pales in comparison.
So, apparently James Patterson is the world’s most successful writer (via Pimp My Novel) [key quote: “Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all. Really, it’s not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grisham’s, King’s and Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.)”]. This is fascinating stuff, especially when you dig in and read how hard the man works, although he’s pretty much just a Content Supplier at this point, and not so much a writer.
Which is cool; I doubt Patterson has sleepless nights regretting that he never wrote that spiritually devastating Serious Novel. The man pays co-authors out of his own pocket in order to publish 9 books a year; there’s no way he has any angst about the road he’s taken. Plus, sleeping on a bed of money kind of eases the pain a little, I’ll bet.
Some struggling authors might be jealous of Patterson’s success. Some who have even had a measure of success might be envious, but not me. And not because of fruity artistic concerns, either (they can make Avery Cates lunchboxes if they want, or — OOH! — Avery Cates cologne), but because I do not ever want to work that hard.
I can’t speak for other authors, because I shun the company of other writers (all they want to do is talk about craft and writing and the business of publishing, when all I want to talk about is who is buying the next round, when will the next round be forthcoming, and where are we going after closing time), but for me, my authorial dream life has always been the sort they depict in the movies and television: Rich writer spends about 5 minutes a day writing, about six hours a day endorsing huge checks, and the rest attending fabulous parties. I enjoy the writing, so writing for a few hours every day is fun, but that’s about where my ambition ends, and I fully believe in paying other people to do things like read my contracts, market my books, cut up and pre-chew my food, etc.
SO, I will never be quite as rich or successful as Mr. Patterson, sure, I accept that. Trust me, you will never hear me complaining because I haven’t published nine books in the past year, and I will never, ever, bemoan the fact that I’m not allowed to run my own marketing meetings at Hachette. Trust me. I’m putting all my efforts into becoming Castle from the TV show, sans daughter. Although, I must admit, the idea of paying other folks to write my books for me is kind of appealing. Except for the paying part. Maybe I could start the first ever unpaid internship for ghostwriting? College kids would submit writing samples and I’d pick three every year to live at my house and write a novel each for me to submit under my name. IT’S GENIUS!
Who’s with me? All accepted interns would be required to address me as El Jefe. Submit your resumes via my contact page.
In order to celebrate and promote the release of The Eternal Prison across the pond in the U.K., I’ve created some new videos giving the plots of The Electric Church and The Digital Plague in about one minute, as a refresher course for folks who are thinking about buying The Eternal Prison. Here’s the first one, The Electric Church in One Minute:
The next one, The Plot of The Digital PLague in One Minute, will follow later this week. Enjoy!
Yea, verily: A merry fan has created a Facebook page for the books. If you’re on Facebook, why not join up? It’s fun, and all the cool kids are doing it.
Songs listened to while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald on the subway the other night: